Sapphire HD 5830 Modern Warfare 2 Edition Review

Introduction:

What! Another 5 series release from ATI and its partners! Why yes kiddies here it is in the form of the anticipated Sapphire HD 5830. This makes it a total of eleven Direct X 11 video cards in the past 5 months, which is a stunning achievement. At this point, why come out with another HD 5XXX series video card? ATI has pretty much every price point covered from the bottom dollar 5400 series on up to the King of the hill HD 5970 with one exception. Between the $180 dollar HD 5770 and $310 HD 5850, ATI does not have a product to compete with the GTX 260 and GTX 275 that currently occupy this price zone. The Sapphire HD 5830 is built using a custom PCB instead of the reference PCB sent from ATI. What this should do is allow ATI's partners some freedom in designing a top performing video card. This could bring up issues with quality, but in this case Sapphire has plenty of experience with making custom PCBs for the silicon. Just take a look at the Vapor-X series as shining examples of this ability.

What you get with the Sapphire HD 5830 are all the features of the HD 5800 series such as the 2.15 Billion transistors, 1GB of GDDR5 memory, Eyefinity support, and more. Where there are differences are in the amount of stream processors at 1120 vs the HD 5870's 1600, with a drop in texture units and ROP's to round it out. To boost up performance the GPU core clock speed has been boosted from the 725MHz used on the HD 5850 up to 800Mhz. This bump allows the HD 5830 to deliver 1.79Tflops of performance. Lets see if this card from Sapphire can fill the price point and outperform the current residents.

Closer Look:

The packaging on this Sapphire HD 5830 is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 themed. The front panel shows a representation of a modern soldier wearing some of the gear necessary in today's chaotic world. The front panel shows off all of the highlighted features of the HD 5830 from Eyefinity support as well as DirectX 11, WIndows 7, HDMI,7.1 HD sound and more. If you couldn't tell by the graphic on the front, Activision's Modern Warfare 2 is included as part of the bundle. The back panel features detailed information on some of the features of the Sapphire HD 5830 as well as a short introduction to Modern Warfare 2. Additional highlights include ROHS Compliance and the fact that most of the packaging is made out of recyclable materials.

The inner package houses all of the hardware. The Sapphire HD 5830 is contained in bubble wrap over an anti static bag and a foam block holds the card in a cardboard tray to keep the card safe during transit. The accessory bundle is kept in a separate box under the video card to reduce the chance of damage to the card from incidental contact.

The bundle of accessories that comes with the Sapphire HD 5830 will give you the ability to hook up this card and get fraggin' in a minimal amount of time. You get the manual (of course), the driver disk, Arcsofts Sim HD software for Arcsofts Total Media player, two 4 pin molex to 6 pin PCIe power adapters, DVI to HDMI adapter,CrossfireX Bridge connector and last but certainly not least, is the highlighted addition to this bundle, a key for a digital download of Activision's Modern Warfare 2. They also included some case bling in the form of a small holographic Sapphire sticker that lets you show people whos hardware you are packing inside your rig.

Lets go dig into the Sapphire HD 5830 to see how it compares to it's competitors in it's price point.